These resettlement programs are like leftover Obama administration stink-bombs. We need to cut back on immigration across-the-board, and especially on refugee programs.
At the Los Angeles Times, "How a Montana county became a stage for the national debate over refugees":
How a Montana county became a stage for the national debate over refugees https://t.co/dVkFZfeQ4E pic.twitter.com/rwCeDWDjw0
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) April 25, 2017
A retiree tried to bring refugees to his Montana town of 6,357. He faced resistance & guns. Then Trump gave him hope https://t.co/MM3qWPIPx2
— Jaweed Kaleem (@jaweedkaleem) April 25, 2017
As images of dead Syrian children flashed across his television this month in Montana, David LeBleu prayed it would finally change minds.More.
"Could this be our chance?" he wondered.
LeBleu, 73, had been campaigning for a year to bring refugees to his tiny mountainside town of Whitefish. But in conservative Flathead County, he was making little headway.
Donald Trump had won the county with 65% of the vote in the presidential election and found widespread support there for his “America first” message and pledge to halt refugee resettlement nationwide. In that sense, the region wasn’t much different from a broad swath of the nation.
If the deaths of “beautiful babies” — as Trump had put it — in what the U.S. said was a poison gas attack couldn’t sway people, LeBleu figured nothing could.
“They don’t like newcomers here,” he said. “They want to just keep things the way they are, in the past.”
LeBleu himself is a newcomer, part of a wave of liberal-minded transplants drawn to Whitefish, population 6,357, for its natural beauty and slower pace of life. He moved from Long Island, N.Y., three years ago, following his daughter after retiring from teaching high school social studies and losing his wife to multiple sclerosis and cancer.
He was delighted that people would “talk to you on the street and ask how you were doing.” As a lifelong Christian, he was pleased to see churches everywhere.
But in Whitefish, the Presbyterian churches he visited were more interested in the Bible than the wider world and didn’t share his passion for women’s or gay rights.
LeBleu finally found a spiritual home alongside other liberal transplants at the Whitefish United Methodist Church. It was already working internationally to pay the salaries of Christian pastors in Angolan villages.
Its motto — “open hearts, open minds, open doors” — was prominently displayed on its website. To LeBleu, those were words to live by.
He saw an opportunity early last year after a photograph of a drowned Syrian boy went viral and a group of mothers in Missoula, a university town 130 miles down the interstate, were so moved that they launched an effort to take in refugees. Their plan to bring refugees to Montana for the first time in decades ignited a statewide debate and a string of demonstrations on both sides of the issue.
LeBleu’s response was to try to bring refugees to Whitefish.
But the faith that dominated northwest Montana was far more conservative than LeBleu had ever experienced.
To him, being a Presbyterian meant a life of public service and openness to other cultures. Back in Long Island, he sat on a refugee council at his church and once housed a Vietnamese refugee and her two sons. He joined churchgoers for a trip to refugee camps in the Middle East, and his church hosted a Coptic Christian priest from Egypt and a pastor from Syria...
0 comments:
Post a Comment